The thick branches slapped across her face, leaving it covered in long angry red reminders, as the dry branches underfoot slashed through her tender skin. She bore the harsh terrain stoically, keeping her eyes downcast and her mind focused on their goal. Mulder. They were going to Mulder. She knew she'd turn around and go back the way they'd come if she allowed her mind to actively consider the fact that she was running barefoot through a heavily wooded area, clutching on to her bulging stomach with one hand and clinging fiercely to Alex Krycek's hand with the other.
He had come to her that morning, telling her the story of how Marita had double-crossed him, yet again, and that he was going to even the score. Settling the score had apparently included taking her to where Mulder was being held, and that was all that mattered to Scully. Even though she didn't understand how reuniting the two of them would matter to Marita in the least, she grasped at the painfully thin straw that Krycek had held out to her, taking a leap of faith that he would in fact, bring her to Mulder.
Now, twelve hours after his surprise visit, she was forcing herself to deliberately ignore the voice of reason in her head that had so willingly silenced itself earlier. She mentally repeated her mantra of "Mulder. We're going to Mulder." Desperately trying not to think about the risk she had placed herself and her baby in, she still couldn't help wondering if Mulder had felt anything at all like this when he'd foolishly rushed out of a hospital after being shot in the head to chase her around the globe.
Just as she realized the dangerous ground her mind was beginning to tread, the terrain under her feet changed. Raising her eyes, Scully realized that they had finally crested the hill they'd been climbing. She looked across the plateau and gasped in shock. Two ghostly white domes were clearly visible on the dark horizon. Reflexively, she tugged on Krycek's hand to pull him back into the bushes. All thoughts of Mulder had immediately been crowded out of her head by the buzzing in her ears. She felt a strange tingling in the back of her neck, the same kind she'd experienced after being stung by an especially hardy and tenacious bee only two years before. She was stumbling back into the undergrowth at a rapid pace when Krycek forcefully yanked her back out.
Still holding her hand tightly, he turned and stared off to his left. Everything fell silent as Scully followed his eyes, looking up, and saw a shimmering, silvery cascade. Within this corona of light, Mulder appeared.
Her rational mind picked that moment to make its existence known, reminding her that what she was witnessing was impossible. Even as she acknowledged the scientific fact, another part of her mind recalled Mulder's words to her about seeing Samantha in starlight and what this vision of Mulder might mean.
Her thought was abruptly cut off by a ragged-sounding high-pitched hum. The sound filled her with terror and revulsion. She knew that hum, knew the bright lights and pain that accompanied it. Not again. She would not be invaded again. Not now. Wrenching her hand free of Krycek's, she wrapped her arms protectively around her stomach, dropped to the ground and began to roll back down the hill they'd climbed, in the hopes of outpacing her would-be torturers and rapists to the bottom and to freedom. She completed one revolution before she felt the earth begin to fall from under her. Instinctively, she threw out one arm in an effort to slow her descent when her hand unexpectedly encountered something smooth and solid and cold.
Her eyes flew open and she gasped as a jolt of pain shot up her arm leaving her wide awake and disoriented. Shaken by her near-tumble out of the unfamiliar bed, she sat up. Blinking rapidly to force her eyes to adjust to the lack of light, she visually swept her surroundings in an attempt to determine her location. Her hearing, more keen in the darkness to compensate for her diminished sight, re-classified the hum that had so terrified her only seconds earlier, and she reached over to hurriedly silence the electronic offender.
Quickly reviewing events in her memory, she couldn't help but marvel at the mysterious ways that the subconscious mind could take events, both real and imagined and recast them in such different circumstances. Sitting up, she gently rubbed at her eyes, and noted that her right cheek, which had spent a considerable amount of time rhythmically brushing against Mulder's, felt slightly irritated. Turning back to check on him, she noted that just as he had predicted he would, he had slept right through the alarm she'd set. Reaching over, she applied an old college dorm trick, gently rotating her thumb in the hollow of Mulder's jaw in an effort to silence his buzzing snore. His jaw obediently slackened, and she softly flattened her hand allowing it to linger on his cheek as she contemplated all that they had done and all they had yet to do. When she'd walked out of Daniel's hospital room the day before, she'd closed the door on a whole range of possible life outcomes, and opened the door to another. She repressed a shudder as she considered her dream scenario--her barefoot and pregnant,acting irrationally and recklessly out of love, putting her faith in someone like Krycek, people bathed in starlight... She tried to remember if Mulder had been drugged recently enough for lingering traces of it to remain in his sperm and somehow affect her, then decided that the more likely culprit behind her bizarre dream was the cold Thai leftovers they'd eaten just before falling into an exhausted, but sated sleep.
Reigning in her musings, she lightly ran her fingers over his kiss-swollen lips in one last caress, then rose and began picking her clothes up from where they had been scattered across the room. She could already see the faint beginnings of a bright golden sunrise through the swaying branches outside the window.
Knowing that she would not have enough time to give her sore muscles a luxurious scented soak in her beloved claw foot tub, she opted to try out the powerful shower massager that Mulder had bought and raved about earlier in the year, when delayed back spasms from his fall through a floor had sent him in search of relief.
As she stepped into the shower's soothing embrace, she realized that she had forgotten to close the bathroom door behind herself, despite having made sleepy assurances to Mulder that she would not wake him before she left. However, he'd begun snoring before she'd even finished her sentence, so she knew that he hadn't heard her and wouldn't consider her to have broken that promise. She further assauged her minor feelings of guilt with the thought that if the shower had awakened him, she would try to tell him about her odd imaginings.
Clean and dressed, she exited the bathroom and with troubled eyes gazed at Mulder, still sleeping soundly. Convincing herself that he needed his sleep more than she needed to tell him about her not-quite-nightmare, she grabbed her jacket and left, reminding herself that it was, after all, only a dream.
The End
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